From the classified advertising archives—the whimsy file

Valve jobs, ring jobs, and protection

Most faucets and spigots have rubber washers that act as gaskets. When you turn off a faucet, the washer is compressed, sealing the opening to the pipe and stopping the flow of water. If you turn faucets too hard when shutting off the water, you compress the washer more than necessary—not too big a deal, except the washer will squish and wear out more quickly.

The smooth operation of your automobile’s engine is all about controlling leaks. Piston rings, which are metal washers that seal the pistons against the cylinder walls, isolate the combustion chamber above the pistons from the lubrication of the piston rods and crankshaft. When the rings fail, the oil from below splashes up into the combustion, and now you’re “burning oil.” That’s what’s going on when excessive black and stinky smoke is coming out of your tailpipe. You need a ring job.

Above that combustion chamber are the valves that open to allow the air/fuel mixture from the carburetor or injector in to be ignited by the spark plug, and those that open to allow the exhaust to escape after the cylinder fires. (I know, I know, you diesel guys are waving your arms in the air, saying “OO, OO, OO . . . ” We’ll talk about diesel combustion another day.)

The valves are operated by the camshaft, which is also lubricated by the engine oil. If the valves leak, fuel and exhaust can trade places, and the engine’s operation gets screwed up. You need a valve job.

Perhaps you’ve had car trouble caused by a worn timing belt. That belt turns the camshaft at just the right ratio to the engine’s revolutions, so that intake valves open, letting in the fuel before the spark plug ignites it, and exhaust valves open after the firing, letting the exhaust out. My car’s engine has eight cylinders, and at highway speed, runs at about 2,500 revolutions per minute, which is 41.6 revolutions a second. All eight cylinders fire with each revolution, so there are 332.8 valve openings (and closings) each second. That’s cutting things pretty close. But we sure expect that engine to start every time, and to run like a clock hour after hour. Say you’re driving three and a half hours from New York to Boston. To get you there, you’re asking for 4,193,280 precisely timed valve repetitions. It’s a wonder it works at all.

It’s all about the holes.

I like to describe the art of organ building as knowing where to put the holes. Organbuilding workshops include immense collections of drill bits. My set of multi-spurs goes from half-inch to three-inches. They graduate in 64ths up to one inch, 32nds up to one-and-a-half, 16ths to two-and-a-half, and 8ths up to three inches. I have two sets of “numbered” bits (1-60 and 1-80), one of twist drills from 1/16 to one-inch, graduated by 64ths, and one set of “lettered” bits (A–Z).

If you’re interested in knowing more about those sets, follow this link: www.engineersedge.com/drill_sizes.html. You’ll find a chart that shows the numbered, lettered, and fractional sizes compared to ten-thousands of an inch: #80 is .0135″, #1 is .228″, just under ¼″ (which is .250). If you have all three sets, and mine are all packed in one big drill index, you’re covered up to nearly half an inch in tiny graduations. 

Why so fussy? Say you’re building tracker action parts, and you’re going to use #10 (B&S Gauge) phosphor bronze wire (.1018) as a common axle. You want the axle to be tight enough so there’s minimal slop (no one likes a rattly action), but loose enough for reliable free movement. A #38 drill bit is .1015 B&S Gauge—too tight by 3/1000s. Next one bigger is #37, .1040″. That’s a margin of 22/1000s, the closest I can get with my sets of bits.

And there are lots of holes.

Lots of the holes in our organs allow the passage of wind pressure. In the Pitman windchests found in most electro-pneumatic organs, there are toe-holes that the pipes sit on and rackboard holes that support them upright. There are holes that serve as seats for primary and secondary valves. There are channels bored in the walls of the chests to allow the exhausting of pouches and there are exhaust ports in the magnets. All of those holes, except in the rackboards, have valves pressed against them to stop the flow of air. 

Let’s take that a step further. A fifty-stop organ has over 3,000 pipes. That’s 3,000 pipe valves. If that organ has seven manual windchests (two in the Great, two in the Swell, two in the Choir, and one in the Solo), that’s 427 primary valves, 427 secondary valves, and 427 magnet exhaust ports, in addition to the pipe valves. There’s one Pitman chest in the Pedal (Spitz Flute 8′, Gedackt 8′, Chorale Bass 4′, Rauschpfeife III) with 32 of each. And there are three independent unit chests in the Pedal with 56 of each. Oh, wait. I forgot the stop actions, 50 times 3. And the expression motors, eight stages each, 16 times 3. And two tremolos . . . That’s 9,162 valves. Not counting the expressions and tremolos, every one of those valves can cause a cipher (when a stop action ciphers, you can’t turn the stop off). 

How many notes do you play on a Sunday morning? The Doxology has 32 four-part chords. That’s 128 notes. If you play it using 25 stops, that’s 3,200 notes, just for the Doxology! Are you playing that Widor Toccata for the postlude? There are 126 notes in the first measure. Using 25 stops? That’s 3,150 notes in the first measure! There are 61 measures. At 3,150 notes per measure, that’s 192,150 to finish the piece. (I haven’t counted the pedal part, and while the last three measures have big loud notes, there aren’t that many.) Using this math, you might be playing four or five hundred thousand notes in a busy service. And remember, in those Pitman chests, four valves operate for each note (magnet, primary, secondary, pipe valve), which means it takes 12,800 valve openings to play the Doxology, and 768,600 for the Widor. Let’s take a guess. With four hymns, some service music, an anthem or two, plus prelude and postlude, you might play 1,750,000 valves on a Sunday. (Lots more if your organ still has the original electro-pneumatic switching machines.) No ciphers today? Organ did pretty good. It’s a wonder it works at all.

Next time the personnel committee sits you down for a performance review, be sure to point out that you play 500,000 notes each Sunday morning.

Dust devils

Pull a couch away from the wall and you’ll find a herd of dust bunnies. Messy, but innocent enough, unless someone in your household is allergic to dust. But dust is a real enemy of the pipe organ. Fire is bad, water is bad, vandalism is bad, but dust is the evil lurker that attacks when you least expect it. A fleck of sawdust coming loose inside a windchest, left from when the organ was built, finds its way onto a pipe valve, and you’ve got a cipher.

Imagine this ordinary day in the life of a church. The organist is practicing, and the custodian is cleaning up in the basement. Airborne dust is sucked through the intake of the organ blower, and millions of potential cipher-causing particles waft through the wind ducts, through the reservoirs, and into the windchests, there to lurk until the last measure of the Processional March of the wedding of the daughter of the Chair of the Board of Trustees—whose family gave the money for the new organ. One pesky fleck hops onto the armature of the magnet of “D” (#39) of the Trompette-en-Chamade, and the last of Jeremiah’s notes continues into oblivion. (Ciphers never happen in the Aeoline when no one is around!)

I’m thinking about valves—how they work, what they do, what are their tolerances, and how many times they repeat to accomplish what we expect—because I was recently asked to provide an estimate for the cost of covering and protection of a large pipe organ during a massive renovation of the interior of a church building. There are organ cases on either side of the huge west window, and another big organ chamber in the front of the church, forming the corner between transept and chancel. There are lots of mixtures, and plenty of reeds—and with something like 3,500 pipes, a slew of valves.

The stained-glass west window will be removed for restoration, and the general contractor will construct a weather-tight box to close the hole. That’ll be quite a disturbance for the organ, with its Trompette-en-Chamade and mixture choruses. The plaster walls will be sanded and painted. The wooden ceiling with its complex system of trusses and beams will be cleaned and refinished. The entire nave, transept, and chancel will be filled with scaffolding, complete with a “full deck” 40 feet up, which will serve as a platform for all that work on the ceiling.

To properly protect a pipe organ against all that, removing the pipes, taping over the toeholes, and covering the windchests with hardboard and plastic is an important precaution. That means that all those little valves cannot be exposed to the dust and disturbance around the organ. To do that, you have to vacuum the chest surfaces, and organbuilders know how to do that without shoveling dust directly into the pipe holes.

The pipes that are enclosed in an expression chamber can be left in place if you disconnect the shutters, and seal the shutters closed with gaffer’s tape and plastic. Even, then, all the reeds should be removed, packed, and safely stored. 

The blower is the best way for foreign stuff to get inside the guts of the organ. It’s essential to prepare the organ blower for the building renovation. Wrap the blower’s air intake securely with plastic and heavy tape. Those 42-gallon “contractor” trash bags are great for this. And cut the power to the blower motor by closing circuit breakers, to be sure that it cannot be inadvertently started. Before you put the blower back into service, give the room a good cleaning, and allow a day or two for the dust to settle before you run the blower. It’s a simple precaution, but really important.

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It’s a lot of work to do all this to a big pipe organ. And it’s a lot more work to put it all back together and tune it. For the same amount of money you could buy a brand-new Steinway Concert Grand piano if it’s a big organ. But if you fail to do this, the future reliability of the organ may be seriously compromised. 

A bit of dust gets into a toehole, and winds up sitting on the note valve. Even if the valve is held open a tiny slit, the resulting trickle of air is enough to make a pipe whimper. A fleck of dust gets caught in the armature of a magnet, and the note won’t stop sounding. And I’m telling you, you wouldn’t believe how tiny, almost invisible a fleck is enough to do that. Lots of organ reed pipes, especially trumpets, are shaped like funnels, and they aggressively collect as much dust as they can. A little speck jolted off the inside of a reed resonator falls through the block and gets caught between the tongue and shallot. No speech.

To the hard-hat wearing, cigar-chewing general contractor, the organbuilder seems like a ninny, fussing about specks of dust. To the member of the vestry that must vote in favor of a huge expenditure to do with flecks of dust, the organbuilder seems like a carpetbagger, trying to sneak an expensive job out of thin air. To the organbuilder, the idea of all that activity, all that disturbance, all that dirt, all those vibrations, and all those workers with hammers, coffee cups, and sandwich wrappings swarming about the organ brings visions of worship made mockery, week after week, by an organ whose lungs are full of everything unholy.

Think about Sunday morning with Widor, Old Hundredth, and all the other festivities, think about valves opening and closing by the millions, and don’t tell me that “a little dust” isn’t going to hurt anything.

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This lecture is about caring for an organ during building renovation. If your church is planning to sand and refinish the floor, paint the walls and ceiling, replace the carpets (hope not!), or install a new heating and air conditioning system, be sure that the people making the decisions know about protecting the organ from the beginning. Your organ technician can help with advice, and any good organbuilder will be available and equipped to accomplish this important work for you. Any good-quality pipe organ of moderate size has a replacement value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. If yours is a three-manual organ with fifty stops, big enough to have a 32-foot stop, it’s likely worth over a million. The congregation that owns it depends on its reliable operation. A simple oversight can be the end of the organ’s reliability.

When there is no building renovation planned, we can carry these thoughts into everyday life. Institutional hygiene is essential for the reliability of the organ. Remember the custodian sweeping in the basement while you’re practicing? Think of the staff member looking for a place to stow a bunch of folding chairs, finding a handy closet behind the sanctuary. That pile of chairs on the bellows of the organ raises the wind pressure and wrecks the tuning. Or those Christmas decorations leaning up against those strange-looking machines—the roof timbers of the crèche may be leaning against a primary valve. You turn on the organ, draw a stop, and a note is playing continually. Organ technicians usually charge for their travel time. It could be a $300 service call for the right person to realize that a broomstick needs to be moved!

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When I hear a great organ playing, I often think of those valves in motion. The organist plays a pedal point on the 32′ Bourdon while improvising during Communion, and in my mind’s eye, I can see a five-inch valve held open, with a hurricane of carefully regulated wind blowing into an organ pipe that weighs 800 pounds. A few minutes later, the organist gives the correct pause after the Benediction, swings into a blazing toccata, and thousands of valves open and close each second. Amazing, isn’t it?

Releathering and repairing pneumatic windchests, I’ve made countless valves myself. I know just what they look like and what they feel like. I like to dust them with talcum powder to keep them from sticking years down the road, and I picture what they smell like—the smell of baby powder mingling with the hot-glue pot. Hundreds of times during service calls or renovation jobs, I’ve opened windchests and seen just how little it takes to make a note malfunction. I’ve seen organ blowers located in the filthiest, stinkiest, rodent-filled, dirt-floored, moldy sumps. I’ve seen the everyday detritus of church life—hymnals, vestments, decorations, rummage-sale signs, and boxes of canned goods piled on organ walkboards and bellows, even dumped on windchests loaded with pipes. Can’t understand why the organ sounds so bad. 

Earlier this week, I visited an organ in which the static reservoir and blower were in a common storage space. A penciled sign was taped to the reservoir at chest height: “Please do not place anything on this unit. Sensitive parts of pipe organ. If you have any questions, see Norma.” When we say, “do not place anything,” how can there be questions?

To the untrained eye, the pipe organ may appear as a brute of a machine. But inside, it’s delicate and fragile. If “cleanliness is next to Godliness” in the wide world, cleanliness is the heart of reliability for the pipe organ. Institutional hygiene. Remember that.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Measure up
When I was an apprentice working in Oberlin, Ohio, we had a particularly bad winter, with several heavy storms and countless days of difficult driving conditions. As part of our regular work, my mentor Jan Leek and I did a great deal of driving as we serviced organs throughout northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. Jan owned a full-size Dodge van—perfect for our work as it was big enough to carry windchests, big crates of organ pipes, and long enough inside to carry a twelve-foot stepladder with the doors closed, if the top step was rested on the dashboard near the windshield. All those merits aside, it was relatively light for its size and the length of its wheelbase, and it was a simple terror to drive in the snow. There can’t have been another car so anxious to spin around.
Jan started talking about buying a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and one afternoon as we returned from a tuning, he turned into a car dealership and ordered a new Jeep Wagoneer—a large station wagon-shaped model. He wanted it to have a sunroof, but since Jeep didn’t offer one he took the car to a body shop that would install one as an aftermarket option. As we left the shop, Jan said to the guy, “I work with measurements all day—be sure it’s installed square.” It was.
Funny that an exchange like that would stick with me for more than thirty years, but it’s true—organbuilders work and live with measurements all day, every day they’re at work. A lifetime of counting millimeters or sixty-fourths-of-an-inch helps one develop an eye for measurements. You can tell the difference between 19 and 20 millimeters at a glance. A quick look at the head of a bolt tells you that it’s seven-sixteenths and not a half-inch, and you grab the correct wrench without thinking about it. Your fingers tell you that the thickness of a board is three-quarters and not thirteen-sixteenths before your eyes do. And if the sunroof is a quarter-inch out of square, it’ll bug you every time you get in the car.
And with the eye for measuring comes the need for accuracy as you measure. Say you’re making a panel for an organ case. It will have four frame members—top, bottom, and two sides—and a hardwood panel set into dados (grooves) cut into the inside edges. The drawing says that the outside dimensions are 1000mm (one meter) by 500mm (nice even numbers that never happen in real life!). The width of the frame members is 75mm. You need to cut the sides to 1000mm, as that’s the overall length of the panel. But the top and bottom pieces will fit between the two sides, so you subtract the combined width of the two sides from the length of the top and bottom and cut them accordingly: 500mm minus 75mm minus 75mm equals 350mm.
You make a mark on the board at 350mm—but your pencil is dull and your mark is 2mm wide. Not paying attention to the condition of the pencil or the actual placement of the mark, you cut the board on the “near” side of the mark and your piece winds up 4mm too short. The finished panel will be 496mm wide. Oh well, the gap will allow for expansion of the wood in the humid summer. But wait! It’s summer now. In the winter your panel will shrink to 492mm, and the organist will have to stuff a folded bulletin into the gap to keep the panel from rattling each time he plays low AAA# of the Pedal Bourdon (unless it’s raining).
You can see that when you mark a measurement on a piece of wood, you must make a neat clean mark, put it just at the right point according to your ruler, and remember throughout the process on which side of the mark you want to make your cut. If you know your mark is true and the length will be accurate if the saw splits your pencil mark, then split the pencil mark when you cut!
I’ve had the privilege of restoring several organs built by E. & G.G. Hook, and never stop delighting at the precision of the 150-year-old pencil marks on the wood. The boys in that shop on Tremont Street in Boston knew how to sharpen pencils.
Another little tip—use the same ruler throughout the project. As I write, there’s a clean steel ruler on my desk that shows inches with fractions on one edge and millimeters grouped by tens (centimeters) on the other. It’s an English ruler exactly eighteen inches long, and the millimeter side is fudged to make them fit. The last millimeter is 457, and the first millimeter is obviously too big. If I were working in millimeters and alternating between this ruler and another, I’d be getting two versions of my measurements. While the quarter-millimeter might not matter a lot of the time, it will matter a lot sometimes. I have several favorite rulers at my workbench. One is 150mm long (it’s usually in my shirt pocket next to the sharp pencil), another is 500, and another is 1000. I use them for everything and interchange them with impunity because I know I can trust them. With all the advances in the technology of tools I’ve witnessed and enjoyed during my career, I’ve never seen a saw that will cut a piece of wood a little longer. The guy who comes up with that will quickly be wealthy (along with the guy who invents a magnet that will pick up a brass screw!).
My wife Wendy is a literary agent, with a long list of clients who have fascinating specialties. In dinner-table conversations we’ve gone through prize-winning poets, crime on Mt. Everest, multiple personalities, the migration of puffins, flea markets, and teenagers’ brains (!). Her client Walter Lewin is a retired professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is famous for his rollicking lectures in the course Physics 8.01, the most famous introductory physics course in the world. On the first page of the introduction to his newly published book, For the Love of Physics: From the End of the Rainbow to the Edge of Time—A Journey Through the Wonders of Physics, Lewin addresses his class: “Now, all important in making measurements, which is always ignored in every college physics book”—he throws his arms wide, fingers spread—“is the uncertainty of measurements . . . Any measurement that you make without knowledge of the uncertainty is meaningless.” I’m impressed that Professor Lewin thinks that inaccuracy is such an important part of the study of physics that it’s just about the first thing mentioned in his book.
The thickness of my pencil lines, my choice of the ruler, and the knowledge about where in the line the saw blade should go are uncertainties of my measuring. If I know the uncertainties, I can limit my margin of error. I do this every time I make a mark on a piece of wood. And by the way, if you’re interested at all in questions like “why is the sky blue,” you’ll love Lewin’s book. And for an added bonus you can find these lectures on YouTube—type his name into the search box and you’ll find a whole library. Lewin is a real showman—part scientist, part eccentric, all great communicator—and his lectures are at once brilliantly informative and riotously humorous.
Now about that panel that will fit into the dados cut in the frame members. Given the outside dimensions and the width of the four frame pieces, the size of the panel will be 850mm x 350mm (if your cutting has been accurate). But don’t forget that you have to make it oversize so it fits into the dado. 7.5mm on each side will do it—that allows for seasonal shrinkage without having the panel fall out of the frame. So to be safe, cut the dados 10mm deep allowing a little space for expansion, and cut the panel to 865mm x 365mm—that’s the space defined by the four-sided frame plus 7.5mm on each side, which is 15mm on each axis. Nothing to it.
Now that you’ve all had this little organbuilding lesson, look at the case of a good-sized organ. There might be 40 or 50 panels. That’s a lot of opportunity for error and enough room for buzzing panels to cover every note of the scale.

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For the last several days I’ve been measuring and recording the scales and dimensions of the pipes of a very large Aeolian-Skinner organ that the Organ Clearing House is preparing to renovate for installation in a new home. I’m standing at a workbench with my most accurate measuring tools while my colleague Joshua Wood roots through the pipe trays to give me C’s and G’s. Josh lays the pipes out for me, I measure the inside and outside diameters, thickness of the metal (which is a derivative of the inside and outside diameters—if outside diameter is 40mm and the metal is 1mm thick, the inside diameter is 38mm. I take both measurements to account for uncertainties.), mouth width, mouth height, toehole diameter, etc. As I finish each pipe, Josh packs them back into the trays. With a rank done, we move the tray and find another one. Now you know why I’m thinking about measurements so much today.
When studying, designing, or making organ pipes, we refer to the mouth-width as a ratio to the circumference, the cut-up as a ratio of the mouth’s height to width, and the scale as a ratio of the pipe’s diameter to its length. If I supply diameter and actual width of the mouth, the voicer can use the Archimedian Constant (commonly known as π - Pi) to determine the mouth-width ratio, and so on, and so forth.
Here’s where I must admit that my knowledge of organ voicing is limited to whatever comes from working generally as an organbuilder, without having any training or experience with voicing. My colleagues who know this art intimately will run circles around my theories, and I welcome their comments. From my inexpert position, I’ll try to give you some insight into why these dimensions are important.
The width of the mouth of an organ pipe means little or nothing if it’s not related to another dimension. Using the width as a ratio to the circumference of a pipe gives us a point of reference. For example, a mouth that’s 40mm wide might be a wide mouth for a two-foot pipe, but it’s a narrow mouth for a four-foot pipe. A two-foot Principal pipe with diameter of 45mm might have a mouth that’s 40mm wide—that’s a mouth-width roughly 2/7 of the circumference, on the wide side for Principal tone. The formula is: diameter (45) times π (3.1416) divided by mouth-width (40). In this case, we get the circumference of 141.372mm. Round it off to 141, divide by 40 (mouth-width), and you get 3.525, which is about 2/7 of 141. Each time I adapt the number to keep things simple, I’m accepting the inaccuracy of my measurements.
The mouths of Flute pipes are usually narrower (in ratio) than those of Principals. Yesterday I measured the pipes of a four-foot Flute, which had a pipe with the same 40mm mouth-width, but the diameter of that pipe was about 55mm. That’s a ratio of a little less than 1/4. The difference between a 2/7 mouth and a 1/4 (2/8) mouth tells the voicer a lot about how the pipe will sound.
And remember, those diameters are a function of the scale, the ratio of the diameter to the length. My two example pipes with the same mouth width are very different in pitch. The Principal pipe (45mm in diameter) speaks middle C of an eight-foot stop, while the Flute with the 40mm mouth speaks A# above middle C of an eight-foot.

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You can imagine that the accuracy of all these measurements is very important to the tone of an organ. The tonal director creates a chart of dimensions for the pipes of an organ, including all these various dimensions for every pipe, plus the theoretical length of each pipe, the desired height of the pipe’s foot, etc. The pipemaker receives the chart and starts cutting metal. Let’s go back to our two-foot Principal pipe. Diameter is 45mm. Speaking length is two feet, which is about 610mm. Let’s say the height of the foot is 200mm. The pipemaker needs three pieces of metal—a rectangle that rolls up to become the resonator, a pie-shaped piece that rolls up into a cone to make the foot, and a circle for the languid.
For the resonator, multiply the diameter by π: 45 x 3.1416 = 141.37mm (this time I’m rounding it to the hundredth)—that’s the circumference of the pipe, so it’s the width of the pipemaker’s rectangle. Cut the rectangle circumference-wide by speaking-length-long: 141.37 x 610.
For the foot, use the same circumference and the height of the foot for the dimensions of the piece of pie: 141.37mm x 200.
Roll up the rectangle to make a tube that’s 45mm in diameter by 610 long, and solder the seam.
Roll up the piece of pie to make a cone that’s 45mm in diameter at the top and 200mm long, and solder the seam.
Cut a circle that’s 45mm in diameter and solder it to the top of the cone, then solder the tube to the whole thing. (I will not discuss how to cut the mouth or form the toehole.)
But Professor Lewin’s adage reminds us that no pipemaker is ever going to be able to cut those pieces of metal exactly 141.37mm wide. That’s the number I got from my calculator after rounding tens-of-thousandths of a millimeter down to hundredths. You have to understand the uncertainty of your measurements to get any work done.

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As I take the measurements of these thousands of organ pipes, I record them on charts we call scale sheets—one sheet for each rank. I reflect on how important it is to the success of the organ that this information be accurate. I’m using a digital caliper—a neat tool with a sliding scale that measures either inside or outside dimensions. The LED readout gives me the dimensions in whatever form I want—I can choose scales that give inches-to-the-thousandth, inches-to-the-sixty-fourth, or millimeters-to-the-hundredth. I’m using the millimeter scale, rounding hundredths of a millimeter up to the nearest tenth. As good as my colleagues are and as accurately as they might work, they’re not going to discern the difference between a mouth that’s 45.63mm wide from one that’s 45.6mm.
And as accurately as I try to take and record these measurements, what I’m measuring is hand made. I might notice that the mouth of a Principal pipe is 16.6mm high on one end and 16.8mm high on the other. A difference of .2mm can’t change the sound of the pipe that much—so I’ll record it as 16.7. I know the uncertainties of my measurements. I adapt each measurement at least twice (rounding to the nearest tenth and adapting for uneven mouth-height) in order to ensure its accuracy. Yikes!

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Earlier I mentioned how people who work with measurements all the time develop a knack for judging them. I’ve been tuning organs for more than 35 years, counting my way up tens of thousands of ranks of pipes, listening to and correcting the pitches, all the time registering the length of the pipes subconsciously. With all that history recorded, if I’m in an organ and my co-worker plays a note, I can reach for the correct pipe by associating the pitch with the length of the pipe.
π (pi) is a magical number—that Archimedes ever stumbled on that number as the key to calculating the dimensions of a circle is one of the great achievements of the human race. How can it be possibly be true that πd is the circumference of a circle while πr2 is the area? Here’s another neat equation. A perfect cone is one whose diameter is equal to its height. The volume of a perfect cone is exactly half that of a sphere with the same diameter. How did we ever figure that one?
There are no craftsmen in any trade who understand π better than the organ-pipemaker. When you visit a pipe shop, you might see a stack of graduated metal rectangles destined to be the resonators of a rank of pipes. The pipemaker knows π as instinctively as I can tell that the first millimeter on my ruler is too big. Imagine looking at a tennis ball and guessing its circumference!

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When you’re buying measuring tools, you must pay attention to accuracy. Choose an accurate ruler by comparing three or four of them against each other and deciding which one is most accurate. Choose an accurate level by comparing three or four of them. You’ll be surprised how often two levels disagree. Just as mathematics gives us the surety of π, so physics gives us the surety of level. There is only one true level!
I’ve been showing off all morning about how great I am with measurements in theory and practice, so I’ll bust it all up with another story about van windshields. I left the shop to drive to the lumberyard to pick up a few long boards of clear yellow pine. They had beautiful rough-cut boards around thirteen feet long, eight and ten inches wide, and two inches thick. Each board was pretty heavy, and as they were only roughly planed, it was easy to get splinters from them. I put the first one in the car, resting the front end on the dashboard right against the windshield. Perfect—the door closed fine, let’s get another. I slid the second one up on the first, right through the windshield. Good eye! 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House

Can it be fixed?
I love to cook. Wendy says I have a lot to show for it. I usually don’t follow recipes but I enjoy reading cookbooks to learn how successful chefs think about food, how they blend and enhance flavors, what techniques they enjoy. As an organbuilder I’ve spent a lifetime learning about tools, handling tools, trying to choose the right tool for the right job. My attitude and affinity toward tools spills over into my pleasure in the kitchen.
One of my favorite implements is a Weber four-burner propane grill that has lived on the back deck of our house in Maine for more than eight years. I know purists only barbeque with live fire, and of course we have a couple charcoal grills and a smoker, but that slick gas grill is a versatile, reliable, and convenient tool. The four-burner design allows me to cook with “indirect” heat—turn on the outer two burners, and whatever is in the center of the grill is not directly over the flame. I often roast a chicken in a cast-iron frying pan (breast down) over the center of grill. We roast vegetables and potatoes, and of course grill meat. I use it all year unless we’re away from the house through a couple snowstorms and the deck gets away from me.
Last month the burners gave out. Though they are made of stainless steel, eight years of weather and cooking heat was about all they could take. I checked at the hardware store where I bought the grill and saw that replacing it with the current similar model would cost most of nine hundred dollars. But the grill-guy at the store suggested I contact Weber with the serial number and see if it was still under warranty. Sure enough, a friendly woman answered the phone, verified that the ten-year warranty was still in effect, and sent a kit with four burners and two igniters at no charge.
I set aside a Saturday morning for the chore, expecting a greasy and smelly ordeal of rotted screw heads and caked-on cooking residue all over everything. What I found was four stainless-steel screws in near perfect condition, simple construction, and everything except the burned-out burners in terrific shape. It took about twenty minutes to take it apart, slip out the old burners, put in the new ones, clean all the parts, and put it back together. It worked perfectly. I was delighted—and had to dream up another chore to complete the morning. Or maybe I went off to the cooperative butcher thirty minutes up the road to prepare for the rededication.
This experience led me to reflect on the importance of “repairability,” a concept critical to the life of a pipe organ. Repairability is one of the by-products of mass production. Thousands of identical automobiles are produced using interchangeable parts, so assuming a good distribution system, it’s easy to repair your car by replacing an alternator, a timing belt, ball joints, even a transmission or engine. Some components of pipe organs can be mass-produced with good effect, but even if thousands of Skinner keyboards are more or less the same, the complete organ is most often a “one-off,” comprising a catalogue of components in unique combination. It reflects well on an organbuilder when a technician expects a repair to be difficult and is pleasantly surprised by how easy it is.
Ernest Skinner intended his organs for indefinite life. He knew that pneumatic leather would fail eventually, though I know of two organs in the Boston area built in the 1920s by Mr. Skinner that are still working on their original leather—imagine, 90-year-old pouch leather! His windchest design provides for future releathering. If a Skinner windchest is releathered two or three times it will be necessary to plug and re-drill many screw holes, but otherwise, it’s a snap to get the chests apart.
The keyboards in most electro-pneumatic consoles are designed so a technician can easily reach tracker-touch springs, contacts, and various adjustment points. In Skinner or Aeolian-Skinner consoles, for example, you remove two screws from under the keytable, the keyboards slide out in a stack, then each keyboard can be hinged up for access to the contacts. In the console of an electro-pneumatic organ by Casavant, the keyboards are usually removable. They are positioned accurately by heavy steel pins—you just lift them off their dowels and out they come.
We all know of those installations where the console is built into the choir risers. The organist who plays on a big three- or four-manual organ has great sightlines that way. But what if something goes wrong inside the console? I remember vividly a repair I made to the combination action of a big three-manual Casavant organ. It had the standard-issue electro-pneumatic-mechanical combination action prevalent in Casavant organs of the 1940s and ’50s—the console was jam-packed with intricate mechanical gizmos. The design of the console allowed for access to accomplish the repair, but we couldn’t get to the console panels. It took two days to take apart the choir risers, and even longer to put them back together—a week’s work for two guys because a piston wouldn’t set correctly. That was an expensive repair.

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Thanks to a lifetime of recreational cooking and some input from the gene pool of a family populated with tall people with big bones, there are places inside some organs where I can’t go. I’ve had many an unpleasant afternoon slithering my “dainty little body” across a filthy floor trying to reach the leather nuts of a pedal action. I especially enjoy the encounters with broken light bulbs on those dirty floors. The other day I visited a church that’s home to an 1868 W.B.D. Simmons organ. (Lovely organ, by the way, and about to go on the market.) I climbed a very rickety 143-year-old ladder inside the organ and crossed a walkboard behind the Great windchest so I could get a look through the Swell shutters. I walked as though on eggshells, knowing that if I fell through I’d wreck the tracker action behind the keyboards.
At a recent convention of the American Institute of Organbuilders, I sat on a panel with several colleagues discussing the maintenance of pipe organs. Mark Venning (then managing director of Harrison & Harrison Ltd., organbuilders in Durham, UK) spoke eloquently about the dangers of organ maintenance, suggesting that it’s the responsibility of the technicians to insist on safety in the organs they service. One instrument I maintain has a tall freestanding case with the Great division at the top. There’s a wooden walkboard against the back of the case about eighteen feet up, on which you stand to reach through the case doors to tune the Great. The walkboard is painted to match the case—a hard and glossy paint. The dust that collects on that slick surface feels just like ball bearings under my shoes. I really should ask the church to let me build a railing.
In the late 1970s I was working with John Leek, organbuilder in Oberlin, Ohio. (John’s son James now runs that neat little company.) We cared for a large Hook & Hastings organ in the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Cleveland, where we also did a lot of large-scale renovation work. One Friday afternoon, thinking of rush-hour traffic (if you know Cleveland, you’ll know “Dead Man’s Curve” on I-71!), I was hurrying across the top of the Swell box, arms full of tools, to the ladder that would get me twenty feet to the floor. I jumped on the ladder in the usual cavalier fashion (when you get used to the geometry of a particular ladder you can get careless), missed a step, and down I went. It was a narrow little chute surrounded by façade pipes, swell box wall, and some pedal pipes, so there was no option but to stay upright. I landed hard on my feet and my breath was knocked out. My ankles and lower back were sore for days. If that happened to me today I doubt I’d escape uninjured, although in 1589 on the famous leaning tower by the cathedral in Pisa, Italy, Galileo used different sized cannonballs to prove that I wouldn’t fall any faster today than I did in 1979! Oof. But come to think of it, this story is about me more than about the design of the organ.
It has been my privilege to be shown through the magnificent and immense Newberry Organ in Woolsey Hall at Yale University by my friend and colleague Joe Dzeda, who with Nick Thompson-Allen serves as curator of that mighty instrument. Now that’s a big organ. It has 197 ranks and it goes from way over there to way over the other way. And it’s tall. There’s a spot up on the top level of the organ that is not for the faint of heart—you step out across an abyss where you can look down through multiple layers of the instrument. Your heart skips a beat and over you go. Oopah! Reminds me of photos I’ve seen of the suspension bridge made of rope in the Himalayas.
While there are lots of organs where you open a door and go inside, there are also many instruments, especially those in shallow freestanding cases, where all the maintenance work is done by reaching into the case through panels and doors. These organs are typically very crowded inside. And if the organ is large enough that the case is deeper than the reach of the technician, things can get very difficult. If a bass pipe in the far corner is not speaking properly, you can find that you have to remove ten reed pipes and ten mixture notes so you can stand on a walkboard—tricky and cumbersome if you’re working from a narrow walkboard high off the floor—you hate it when a Trumpet rolls off the edge of the walkboard. (That never happened to me—I’ve just heard that it’s possible!) A simple tuning can become a multiple-day event.
I care for an organ on Cape Cod built in the 1980s that has tracker action, a freestanding case for the Great, and a second case behind for Swell and Pedal. I’m sure that when the organ was being planned, a musician or member of the clergy insisted that the organ couldn’t project forward toward the nave past a certain point—the result being that the space between the two cases is narrow enough that I can get on the Great walkboard only if I remove all the case panels, my belt, wallet, and strip to my tee-shirt. Then I can just wriggle past the posts of the case. Looking at the organ now, it’s hard to imagine that there couldn’t have been just an inch or two more space—that wouldn’t have changed the floor plan for the choir and clergy a bit. But the way it is, it’s terribly difficult to tune that organ or to reach the tracker action that runs between the two cases. It’s as if the builder didn’t want anyone getting inside the organ.
Another organ, also on Cape Cod, is so tight inside that I make a point of wearing “sacrificial” tee-shirts when I go there. It’s one step worse than the last organ I mentioned because I know I can’t get inside the organ to tune without tearing my shirt on the iron hooks that hold the windchest bungs closed.
Another problem in maintaining organs in shallow cases is that opening doors or access panels changes the acoustics inside the case and the tuning is altered. In other words, a pipe that’s in tune when the doors are closed goes out of tune when they’re opened. The first time I encountered that as a fledgling tuner in the late 1970s was in a Flentrop organ in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. The only way to get pipes properly in tune was to listen, open a panel and tap a pipe, then close the panel and listen again. You can sometimes figure out that opening a door on the C-side of the organ doesn’t change the C#-side tuning, so you can reach across, but then you have to be careful that your body heat doesn’t change the organ’s internal temperature. Oh, and be sure you’re not holding on to a brass tuning cone for too long, because the tool heats up in your hands and changes the temperature around the pipe you’re tuning. Whose idea was all this, anyway?
And while we’re talking about temperature, what about all those incandescent light bulbs inside the organ?

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Most pipe organs seem pretty sturdy at first glance, but there are lots of ways that a poorly designed structure can interfere with the care of the organ. I know of a very large organ in which the walkboard for access to the Great is in contact with the wind system. When a tuner stands on the walkboard, the wind-pressure increases—this makes tuning theoretically impossible.
I know of another organ in which the Great rollerboard (a major component of the tracker action) is suspended from the Great walkboard. When you stand on the walkboard the action sags, the pallets (pipe valves) close partially, and the wind to the pipes is diminished—another instance where tuning the Great is theoretically impossible.

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If an organ is easily serviceable, it will have a longer life. If components of an organ cannot be reached, they cannot be maintained. If an organ is difficult to get around in, the well-meaning technician cannot do a good job. I care for a few instruments that are difficult and uncomfortable to manage, and I admit that’s on my mind when I’m on way to one of them. I wake up in the morning thinking, “Yuck. I have to go there today.” You struggle all day to tune, knowing that the organist won’t be able to tell that you did anything.
On the other hand, a well-designed organ is a pleasure to care for. You can spend a day doing mechanical adjustments and repairs and tuning, and leave knowing that you’ve made a difference. You know the organist will be pleased, and the church’s money is well spent.
Here are some of the factors common to organs that are well designed, well built, and easily maintained:
Only high-quality materials are used.
• If a console is full of cheap plastic parts, the technician can hardly help breaking things.
• If a windchest is full of cheap parts, it will not stay reliable through changes in weather and climate, and the technician cannot help breaking things.
Every part of the organ can be reached by a person of at least average size.
• I admit I’m on the large side—but too much of too many organs can only be reached by teeny people, if they can be reached at all.
• If you can’t reach a pipe you can’t tune it.
• If you can’t reach a pipe, you can’t correct its speech.
• If you can’t reach a leather nut, you can’t adjust the action.
• If you can’t reach a keyboard spring, you can’t replace it.
• If you spend time taking things apart to reach that pipe that’s not speaking, the tuning bill skyrockets.
The organ’s structure should be sturdy and rigid.
• If a windchest can move, the action will always be changing.
• If a technician’s weight on the walkboard changes any function of the organ, tuning is theoretically impossible.
• If a ladder is flimsy or unstable, the technician is either in danger (as is the organ) or the technician may choose not to climb up. (I’m not going up to the Swell until I can install a new ladder—life is short enough without taking industrial and personal risks to tune the Oboe.)
The organ’s interior is well lit.
• If I can’t see it, I can’t fix it.
• Maybe I should start billing my clients for tools that I lose when I can’t see inside the organ.
If you’re ever in the position to participate in the conception of a new or relocated pipe organ, consider starting from the tuner’s point of view. You want your tuner to look forward to visiting your church. Then after a pleasant day of making the organ sound and function better, he can pick up a nice piece of meat on the way home to throw on the grill. 

Joyce Johnson Robinson is associate editor of The Diapason.

Christopher Houlihan may very well be the youngest organist ever interviewed by The Diapason. A Connecticut native, Houlihan—sometimes known as “Houli”—made his debut album at 19 (a recording of the Vierne Second Symphony, made before he went to France in his junior year; see the review by David Wagner in The Diapaso, January 2009, pp. 19–20). His second recording (Joys, Mournings, and Battles, Towerhill Recordings) was recently released—a significant achievement for any artist, but all the more amazing given his youth. Houlihan, who placed first in the High School Division of the Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition (see David Spicer, “Albert Schweitzer Organ Competition 2003,” The Diapason, November 2003, p. 17), is a graduate of Trinity College, where he studied with John Rose; during his senior year he made his orchestral debut with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, performing Barber’s Toccata Festiva. Rose had insisted that Houlihan pursue some study with a different teacher, so during his junior year Houlihan studied with Jean-Baptiste Robin at the conservatory in Versailles, where he earned the French equivalent of an artist’s diploma. He also served as assistant musician at the American Cathedral in Paris, under Edward Tipton, working as choral accompanist and directing two children’s choirs. One Sunday when Tipton was away and Houlihan was to serve as both organist and choir director, the cathedral received a few hours’ advance notice that the President and First Lady of the United States, Mr. and Mrs. George W. Bush, would attend.
Houlihan’s first teacher, John Rose, described meeting the youngster prior to playing a recital—the young man and other family members came an hour early to get a bird’s-eye-view seat, in order to see the console and player up close. This initial meeting led to lessons with Rose at Trinity College, and subsequently to Houlihan’s matriculating there. Rose notes that one of Houlihan’s qualities is the ability to generate excitement about the organ and its music, to be able to communicate the music and his passion for it to an audience, and credits some of this to Houlihan’s technical mastery of rhythm and accent in way that makes the music “electrifying.” Rose feels that Houlihan’s “thirst for knowledge and learning” lead him to be “well informed about various performance practices,” yet realizing “the importance of bringing his own ideas and a fresh outlook to his interpretations. He also understands (and enjoys) the need to adapt his ideas uniquely, as needed, from one organ to the next.”
Christopher Houlihan’s fans are of all ages and include an 85-year-old retired math teacher at Trinity, along with students at the college; they have formed a group known as the “Houli Fans,” and this has expanded into marketing: t-shirts, caps, and mugs are available. Most of these students had never experienced an organ recital before supporting their friend. When he performed with the symphony during his senior year, they chartered buses to take throngs of students to the orchestra hall, where they rained down loud cheers from the balcony. Christopher Houlihan currently studies with Paul Jacobs at the Juilliard School, and is represented by Phillip Truckenbrod Concert Artists (www.concertartists.com). Houlihan can be found on Facebook and YouTube, and his website is www.christopherhoulihan.com.

Joyce Robinson: Do you come from a musical family?
Christopher Houlihan: My family isn’t musical, but my parents have always been incredibly supportive of my passion. I think my mother signed me up for piano lessons just so I would have something to do after school. At the beginning I liked it, I thought it was all right, but I kept practicing and eventually joined a church choir in my hometown of Somers, Connecticut when I was about 8, and discovered the organ. The organ in the church was an electronic organ, and the organist there always had the tremolos on, but she showed me everything she knew and encouraged me to explore. She let me practice on the instrument. I was immediately excited by it and drawn into it, and I started reading as much as I could about the organ and tried to talk to other organists, but at the same time, I had no idea how to take organ lessons. It was obvious you could take piano lessons or lessons on any other instrument, but the organ was kind of a mystery to both my parents and me. My mother loves telling the story of walking into my bedroom and seeing me at my digital keyboard, moving my feet around. She discovered I had put rows of masking tape on her hardwood floor, in the outline of the pedalboard, so that I could learn how to play the pedals. She was a bit horrified that I had put tape all over her floor, but at the same time, she thought it was pretty clever.
Then, in 1999, my mother read in the newspaper that there was an organ concert going on in Springfield, Massachusetts. We’d never been to an organ concert before, never really heard any classical organ music, but we went, and I got hooked. I still have the program from that recital, and, looking back on it, I can’t imagine having had a better introduction to concert organ music: I heard Franck’s Pièce Héroïque and Vierne’s Third Symphony for the first time that day. After the concert, we spoke with the organist, and I said, “I want to take organ lessons, what do I do?” And the man said, “Why don’t you come down to Hartford and play for me?” This was John Rose. We went to Trinity, and I played for him; I was twelve years old, and he took me on as a student. From there, it just took off—I kept studying with him throughout high school, and when it came time to look at colleges, Trinity turned out to be a very good fit for me. John never pushed for me to go to Trinity; he would have been supportive of any decision I made, but for a lot of reasons I chose Trinity, and I’m really glad I did.

JR: Is that where your interest in Vierne came from? John Rose is well known for his work on Vierne, and your first recording was mostly Vierne.
CH: Yes, it was. John has been a wonderful mentor, and he’s never forced any particular style of playing on me, and I’ve studied all sorts of repertoire with him. But I do suppose I’ve had more exposure to Vierne than many other people, certainly because of his love of Vierne. I remember working on the “Berceuse” from the 24 Pieces in Free Style; that was probably my first Vierne piece.

JR: How old were you then?
CH: I’m not sure! I was in middle school, probably 13. Then when I got to Trinity, he said “You should really learn the Vierne Second Symphony, I think it would be a good piece for you.” And I learned it, and I absolutely loved it. Vierne is very chromatic, it’s very different from most Widor . . . Some people say things like, “You should never play a complete French symphony, it’s too long, it’s trash, audiences don’t like it,” but I find it incredibly gratifying as a performer and as a listener to hear a complete symphony. You rarely go to an orchestral concert and hear the Finale from a Beethoven symphony—you hear the whole work. I think a Vierne symphony works much better as a complete piece . . . the individual movements speak much more profoundly when you hear them in the context of the whole symphony.

JR: You must have worked on quite a bit of French repertoire with John Rose before you went to France.
CH: I did.

JR: And when you got to France, did you find the approach to French music to be different?
CH: That’s a complicated question to answer, but yes, the approach was very different. I went to France because I had a strong affinity for French romantic music, but I also wanted to learn more about French classical music, as well as study modern French music. Certainly one of the most beneficial aspects of studying organ music in France is hearing and playing on French organs. But having grown up on American organs, playing primarily in drier American acoustics, and approaching music from an American perspective in general, I really had to learn a new style of playing, one that was more effective for those instruments and rooms. My teacher, Jean-Baptiste Robin, often talked to me about “taste,” which is, of course, completely subjective, but I became more aware of the fact that taste is also cultural, and people from two different backgrounds (musical and otherwise) will have very different opinions about what they consider to be “in good or bad taste.” For example, sometimes I would phrase something a certain way, or accent something a certain way, and Jean-Baptiste would remark that it sounded “American.” Well, I am American, after all!
What is true, though, is that French music sounds most “at home” on French organs. One of the most incredible experiences I had was going to Poitiers Cathedral, where Jean-Baptiste Robin is titulaire, and hearing the 1791 Clicquot organ there. When I heard French classical music on that instrument I was almost in tears, it was so beautiful. That music came alive and worked in a way I had never heard it before. The same can be said of romantic music, but to a less extreme degree, when hearing it on French romantic organs. But what I’ve come to believe through those experiences is that what is far more important than choosing the historically correct stops, or playing in a historically correct way, is the type of musical effect that comes across to a listener. If hearing Widor played at St. Sulpice brings you to your knees, then that music should have the same effect wherever you’re playing it, and, typically, in my opinion, to get that kind of effect on American organs, you have to play the music in a very different way than you might in France.

JR: So are you saying that one must register more with one’s ears than just looking at labels on the knobs?
CH: Yes, absolutely. And at the same time, you don’t have to travel all the way to France to register that way. I think you have to go with your gut—you have to look for what’s the most musical solution when you’re registering anything. It’s not what the book says is the correct registration, but what has an effect—what makes the music come alive.

JR: Was there any particular aspect of registration that you had to make adjustments for when you returned to the U.S.?
CH: There are all sorts of things one can do. One basic idea that is important to know about is the upward voicing that a lot of the French organs have, where things really sing in the treble in a way they don’t on most of our organs. There’s not an easy solution to this, but it’s something to keep in mind and listen for. The other thing is that our Swell boxes are, generally, much more expressive even on smaller organs, and you can use them in a different way for the kinds of musical effects that naturally occur without moving the box on a French organ. The reason Franck used the Hautbois with his 8′ foundations was to make the Swell more expressive . . . if the oboe isn’t needed, I leave it off. Many American organs have the only chorus reeds in the Swell, and they might be quite loud; therefore, you don’t always have to play with the full Swell on where Vierne or Widor says “full Swell.” If you’ve only got a full Swell and one more reed on the Great, you don’t get a crescendo effect; you go from loud to louder. You’ve got to allow more liberty for these things, because in the end you’re being truer to the composer’s intentions . . .

JR: Tell us a little more about your time in France. Life in Europe is usually different than it is here, so what was it like for you—your schedule, your study, your practicing? Did you spend time learning the language?
CH: I was there through the Trinity College Paris program. They have about 20 to 30 students there each semester, and through that program I took French language classes, a class on French culture, a course on art history and architecture—they offer all sorts of courses, ranging from history of the European Union, to independent studies on anything you want to learn about. I did part of my coursework through them, and Trinity gave me credit for my organ lessons at the conservatory in Versailles, and my private harmony lessons with Jean-Baptiste.
I was also lucky enough to have an incredible job at the American Cathedral in Paris, working with Ned Tipton. I was the assistant musician, which meant that I accompanied the choir on Sunday mornings, and I directed two children’s choirs—the children’s group, and a teenager group—and along with all this I had an apartment in the cathedral tower, which was really incredible! You could climb to the top of the tower, and you had one of the most spectacular views of Paris. You could see all of the major monuments, really stunning. The cathedral is on the Avenue Georges V, which is right off the Champs Elysees . . . the whole experience was very surreal and I feel so lucky to have had the opportunity. And the people at the cathedral are so wonderful. There are a lot of Americans, of course, and people from England, from Australia, and French people too!

JR: During your time in France, you performed for George and Laura Bush at the American Cathedral in Paris. Can you recall that day?
CH: I’ll certainly never forget it. It actually began on a Saturday afternoon when I got a knock at the door of my apartment. Now, my apartment was 83 steps up a cement spiral staircase, so I didn’t get very many knocks on the door . . . I was fairly surprised to discover the dean of the cathedral and two French police officers with enormous rifles standing in front of me. They explained who would be coming for a visit the following morning. To complicate things, Ned was away, the adult choir hadn’t had a rehearsal the previous Thursday, and we had the children’s choir scheduled to sing that morning too. Unfortunately, we had to keep the news completely secret for security reasons, so I couldn’t let the choirs know what would be happening. Sunday morning was a little hectic . . . security came and set up metal detectors, dogs sniffed through the whole building, and of course, they didn’t care that I had a choir to rehearse! We wound up with about 15 minutes to run through the anthems, but we pulled it off pretty well.

JR: What were your studies like with Jean-Baptiste Robin?
CH: Robin was an excellent teacher and I learned a great deal from him. At his recommendation, we spent the year working almost exclusively on French music, and nothing could have made me happier. Each week I would prepare a different piece, by de Grigny, Marchand, Couperin, or one of the other French Baroque composers. We worked a great deal on Franck, of course, on Alain’s Trois Danses, as well as one of Robin’s own pieces, Trois Éléments d’un Songe.

JR: What made you choose Juilliard for graduate study? For that matter, why even bother with graduate study, because you had already made a recording, you were signed to professional management before you even got a bachelor’s degree, if my calculations were correct?
CH: True. I chose Juilliard because I really wanted to work with Paul Jacobs and I have had a wonderful time studying with him. I’ve been lucky at this point to have studied both at Trinity and at Juilliard, and have had vastly different experiences at both schools. At Trinity, the focus was on studying music in a broader context—a liberal arts school; I took classes in all sorts of things: science, math, philosophy—it was wonderful, and I made friends with all sorts of people studying all different subjects, and I can’t say enough positive things about how that can affect one’s perspective on making music. But I really felt I was ready to study music in a much more intense environment, and Juilliard was a great choice for that. I love being in New York City, being at Juilliard, and working with Paul. It’s been very rewarding.

JR: Has it been an opportunity to learn a lot of new repertoire, or just refine what you already know?
CH: One of the unique things about the Juilliard program is that we’re required to perform a new piece each Thursday morning in our organ studio class, which is open to the public. And that was definitely a big draw to go there, to learn a lot of repertoire. It can sometimes be difficult to learn a piece very deeply when you’re going through so much music so quickly, but you can always bring things back to Paul and work on them more, and of course work on them more on your own, which is where the real music happens, spending time getting to know the music very intimately. To touch on the last question again, even though I’ve been lucky to have these opportunities to record a CD and study in France and work under management, which I’m incredibly grateful for and excited by, I believe one never really stops learning. Juilliard has been a wonderful place for me to grow more as a musician, and I hope to continue to do that for the rest of my life.

JR: You have a website, and a presence on Facebook—do you find that these media help build your audiences?
CH: I’m not sure, but I do think they’re incredibly important tools. How many people are on Facebook now? I have no idea, but there’s no reason not to take advantage of it and to be communicating in the world where most people are interacting today. I don’t know if my online presence necessarily helps build my audience, but it certainly doesn’t hurt it. It certainly helps attract younger people.

JR: Do you notice that your audience has a younger demographic than that of other organists?
CH: I don’t think so, not yet at least, but attracting younger people to classical music is something I feel very strongly about. And one of the greatest things I experienced at Trinity was bringing my friends who weren’t musicians to my organ concerts, and getting them excited about it. They responded very positively.

JR: Would that be the Houli Fans?
CH: The Houli Fans grew out of that, from friends of mine who weren’t musicians, but who came to my organ concerts and got excited by the music and discovered something far more fantastic than they ever expected to. I would have never guessed some of my college friends would greet me by humming the opening bars of Vierne’s Second Symphony—or talk to me about how fascinating a Bach fugue was. Houli Fans has caught on in a very organic way, and audiences everywhere I go are interested to hear more about it. At Trinity, students came to the concerts and saw that I loved performing, thought the music was exciting, and they responded by getting more people to come! This is such a good sign for organ music, to see people, of any age, who don’t know anything about organ music responding to it. I think in a way the organ may stand in a better place now than it ever has, I suppose you could say—it has been so dismissed and ignored for so many years, that now it stands to be rediscovered. We’ve all been in situations where people ask about being an organist. They really don’t know what that is, they don’t know what that means, what we actually do. When they hear exciting classical organ music, they’re so wowed by it—it’s true. I’ve played recitals this year and people come up to me and say, “This was my first organ concert and it was way better than I ever expected!” I tell them, “Now go tell somebody else. And come back again and bring them!” Once people discover what’s going on, they’re excited by it. And that’s a really good sign.

JR: Do you see any special role for technology such as iPods or YouTube to advance organ music, or are those just tools like a CD would be?
CH: I think what’s important is reaching as many people as you possibly can. And people are on Facebook, on YouTube—a lot of people are using these things, and if we ignore them (and I’m not suggesting we necessarily are), you’re ignoring a big part of your audience. So I think it can absolutely help. YouTube is a fantastic resource for hearing and seeing performances—it’s an incredible archive of music and musicians and organs and all kinds of music, not just organ music, and quite a tool for marketing and advertising. Everything links to something else, and people can see you and discover other organ music and other performances.

JR: Well, back to the Houli Fans. What are they up to these days?
CH: We have shirts and hats and coffee mugs, and people are really responding well to it. Everywhere I’ve been this year I hear “Oh, I’m going to join the Houli Fans” and “I’m your newest Houli Fan” and things like that. And I find that both musicians and non-musicians want a very fun way to connect with the performer and somehow be involved in the performance. It’s fun!
And there’s nothing wrong with having a little bit of fun, or with classical music being fun. It’s been fun for centuries!

JR: You also have an interest in musical theater. Do you have much time for that any more?
CH: No, not right now, in graduate school, and with a busy performance schedule. But I did a lot of it in high school—I was music director of several shows. That was a lot of fun, and actually a really great learning experience. And I did a lot of it in college, too—music directing, performing on stage, singing, dancing, and all of that. I really enjoy it. At the moment I don’t have plans to do it professionally, but it’s a small passion of mine. I particularly love the music of Stephen Sondheim, and, coincidentally, I’m going to be inaugurating the organ at the Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts in Fairfield, Iowa.
I think there’s a lot that musicians can learn from theater, both from straight drama and musical theater, about how to approach a musical score, similar to the way an actor takes a script and analyzes everything that’s going on to create a character, and perform that character night after night. I try to approach music the same way—take the score and truly consider how to create a musical experience—in a way . . . a whole play. Not necessarily a story, but create the kind of experience I’d like to have as a listener. I think there’s a lot we can learn from theater and the other arts.

JR: Of what you’ve worked on so far, is there any particular repertoire you found a difficult nut to crack—you mentioned finding the character and learning how to bring that out; is there any music that’s been, say, a little more opaque for you?
CH: One of the most incredible things about the organ literature, and one of the most daunting, is the centuries that it spans. All this repertoire and all these different styles—personally, I think it’s impossible to be fluent in and to perform all these styles in a convincing way. Maybe it’s possible; I’d like to be wrong. When I’m learning a piece in a different style that I haven’t studied before, I try to approach it with respect for the scholarship that’s been done on it and its performance practice, but also perform it in a way that feels honest to me, so that I can perform it and convince the audience of the music. I don’t think there is much value in performing something just because you think you should—that you should play so-and-so’s music. Well, what if you don’t like so-and-so’s music? A lot of people may like so-and-so’s music, and a lot of scholars may say it’s important . . . But I don’t have to perform everything under the sun.

JR: In one of Gavin Black’s regular columns in The Diapason, one of his points was that if you don’t really like something, why waste your time learning it? Life’s too short—unless you’re in a competition and it’s required.
CH: At the same time, I’ve learned some pieces—I’m not sure I can name a specific one—where I’m not sure about it at the beginning, or I think I’m not going to like the piece. But then after I learn it I think, “Wow, now that I’ve studied it, and learned more about what the composer was trying to do, and found ways to make it come alive for my own performance, it really is a good piece.” And sometimes I decide to learn a piece, starting off by thinking it’s a great piece, and then after becoming more familiar with it, decide “This isn’t right for me.” It works both ways.

JR: You’ve already recorded two CDs—are you preparing any other recordings? What are your other plans for the future?
CH: I hope to be able to keep recording, and I hope to be able to continue performing. I really enjoy traveling and meeting new people, but most importantly, I love performing and bringing music to an audience. I believe it’s more like making music with an audience. Sometimes I even tell that to the audience too—I thank them for making music with me, since I can’t do it by myself, and since I get so much joy from performing. Eventually, I’d love to be teaching and sharing my love of organ music with others in any way I can.

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

A recipe for success
A couple months ago—the January issue to be exact—I quoted an article from the newsletter of the parish in which I grew up:

Trapped on the paper, it is just a lot of lines and squiggles, circles and flags, black and white—an ancient language, undecipherable to the uninitiated. But to those who are “called” to it, music on the page is the door to a multi-colored, “sensational” world, both a challenge and a reward for heart, mind, and soul . . .
It seems improbable that a few dozen pages of black and white “directions” could convey the recipe for an opera, or a symphony—and yet they do. But it is only the recipe. It takes a parish choir to pick up the pages, to apply much valuable time and energy, to learn the skills in order to share this amazing transformation with each other, with a church family, and in the praise of the Creator who has gifted us with the miracle that is music.
I improvised on this theme, suggesting that the printed score is a recipe for a living work of art, that the music comes alive when a performer reads the recipe and sends it out into acoustics. I wrote:

We place heavy emphasis on Urtext editions of the pieces we play, those publications claiming to be accurate transmission of the composer’s intentions—the Ark of the Covenant or the Holy Grail. But does that mean we all have to play the pieces the same way? I think that Urtexts ensure that we start from the same recipe—that our extemporizing comes from the same source. But for heaven’s sake, don’t be afraid to add some garlic and salt and pepper to taste.

I drew parallels between cooking and making music—starting with a recipe and creating a masterpiece:

Ingredients in a recipe are the blueprint, the roadmap to be translated by the cook, through the utensils and heat sources, into the magic which is delicious food.
Notes on a score—those squiggles and symbols—are the recipe, the blueprint, the format to be translated by the musician, through the instrument, into the magic that is audible music.
The chef learns the basics, the techniques, the theories, and the chemistry. Once he knows those basics and can reliably prepare and present traditional dishes, he’s freer to experiment because he knows the rules.
The musician learns the techniques, the historical priorities, and the language of the art. Once he can reliably prepare and present the great masterworks, he’s more free to experiment, to innovate, and to challenge himself and his audience. How’s that for a lot of lines and squiggles?
I return to this now because after that column was published several of my friends were in touch to comment and one sent a little stack of quotations from well-known musicians that add to the mix:

Classical, Romantic, Modern, Neo-Romantic! These labels may be convenient for musicologists, but they have nothing to do with composing or performing . . . All music is the expression of feelings, and feelings do not change over the centuries . . . Purists would have us believe that music from the so-called Classical period should be performed with emotional restraint, while so-called Romantic music should be played with emotional freedom. Such advice has often resulted in exaggeration: overindulgent, uncontrolled performances of Romantic music, and dry, sterile, dull performance of Classical music.
The notation of a composer is a mere skeleton that the performer must endow with flesh and blood, so that the music comes to life and speaks to an audience. The belief that going back to an Urtext will ensure a convincing performance is an illusion. An audience does not respond to intellectual concepts, only to the communication of feelings.
That passage may sound like an excerpt from the January issue, but I give myself too much credit. That was Vladimir Horowitz (1903–1989). As a bright-eyed student of historically informed performance in the 1970s, I recall knowledgeable and eloquent student-lounge debates about Horowitz’s performances. My peers and I were pretty sure he was old-fashioned and we were the wave of the future. But I have to admit that his performances were better attended than mine. I guess he did a better job communicating feelings. Mr. Horowitz continued:

In order to become a truly re-creative performer, and not merely an instrumental wizard, one needs three ingredients in equal measure: a trained, disciplined mind, full of imagination; a free and giving heart; and a Gradus ad Parnassum command of instrumental skill. Few musicians ever reach artistic heights with these three ingredients evenly balanced. This is what I have been striving for all my life.

Vladimir Horowitz was celebrated for his performances of the great Russian Romantic piano repertory. I vividly remember a stereo simulcast in 1978 (FM radio and public television) of his performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. (I bought a new stereo just in time for it.) There was something magic about the way his huge Russian hands enveloped that intricate and expansive score. You can see that historic performance by the 75-year-old virtuoso on YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5mxU_7BTRA&feature=related>. Amazing! I gave it the full 45 minutes this afternoon. Give it a look. I think you’ll join me in seeing the imagination and the free and giving heart piled on top of a lifetime’s work developing one of the most fluid keyboard techniques ever.
But he was also celebrated for his readings of sonatas by Antonio Scarlatti: unerring rhythmic drive, mystical coloring of the piano’s tone (how did he do that?), colorful and humorous phrasing. His fertile imagination enabled him to play dozens of those seemingly similar short pieces with infinite expression. Of course, it was technically perfect. That was a given. When Horowitz sat at the piano, one never wondered if he would “get through it.”

Painting a sunset
Arthur Friedheim was a student of Franz Liszt who later developed a successful concert career in the United States. In his book, Life and Liszt (Taplinger, 1961), Friedheim related Liszt’s comments on interpretation:

The virtuoso is not a mason who, chisel in hand, faithfully and conscientiously whittles stone after the design of an architect. He is not a passive tool reproducing feeling and thought and adding nothing of himself. He is not the more or less experienced reader of works which have no margins for his notes, which allow for no paragraphing between the lines . . . He is called upon to make emotion speak, and weep, and sing, and sigh—to bring it to life in his consciousness. He creates as the composer himself created, for he himself must live the passions he will call to light in all their brilliance . . .
Conscientiously whittles stone . . . That sounds ominous. Is that what we do when we produce a historically informed performance from an Urtext edition? Does it follow that the piece sounds the same the next time we play it?
Friedheim continued,

I recall one of my later lessons with him in the Villa d’Este, in Tivoli, not far from Rome. Late one afternoon I sat down at the piano to play Liszt’s Harmonies du Soir. Before I had time to begin he called me to the window. With a wide sweep of the arm he pointed out the slanting rays of the declining sun that were mellowing the landscape with the delicate glamour of approaching twilight. “Play that,” he said. “There are your evening harmonies.”

On January 6, 2010 concert pianist Byron Janis published an article titled “In Praise of Fidelity” in the Wall Street Journal. In it he contrasted comments about musical scores from conductor and music historian Gunther Schuller and Spanish cellist Pablo Casals: Schuller stated, “A conductor is the faithful guardian of the score—the score is a sacred document.” Casals opined, “The art of interpretation is not to play what is written. Our interpretation of what is written cannot, in fact, be written down.”
Mr. Janis relates a story by Julius Seligmann, president of the Glasgow Society of Musicians as he commented on a performance by Frederick Chopin. Mr. Seligmann

. . . attended a recital where the composer played his new Mazurka in B-flat, Opus 7, No. 1, as an encore. According to Seligmann, it met with such great success that Chopin decided to play it again, this time with such a radically different interpretation—tempos, colors and phrasing had all been changed—that it sounded like an entirely different piece. The audience was amazed when it finally realized he was playing the very same Mazurka, and it rewarded him with a prolonged, vociferous ovation.

So what’s this all about? I’ve spent the last 40 years in the thrall of the pipe organ. I’ve worked as a recitalist, a church musician, a tuner and technician, a designer, builder, restorer, relocator, writer, and elocutionist. And I’m not finished. I figure that with luck (and some attention to portion sizes) I could last another 25 years or more. I’m assuming that people will be listening to, commissioning, and caring for organs longer than I’ll be able to appreciate them. But is that a rash assumption?
The publishing schedule of The Diapason means that I submit this column six weeks before publication date. So as I write, the rush of preparing for Christmas is fresh in my mind. (In fact, this is a good moment because in January the mailbox fills with our clients’ payments for December tunings.) During December I ran in and out of about 30 churches and as I’ve noted in years past, there’s not much new. Virtually every organ console and choir room table sports copies of Carols for Choirs (especially the green and orange ones, volumes I and II). And when I look at the paper clips I can see that each choir is singing the same selections. Almost no one sings A Boy Was Born by Benjamin Britten (page 4).
Those books have defined 50 years of Christmas music in American churches—simple proof of the immense influence the English tradition has over our worship. Because of the lovely and brilliant arrangements in those volumes, at least two generations of American church musicians have grown up with David Willcocks, Reginald Jacques, and John Rutter. Each carol, each descant, each varied harmonization is more beautiful than the last. But isn’t there anything else?
Volume I (the green one) was copyrighted in 1961. I first handled it as a young teenager in about 1969, when my voice changed and I got to be in the senior choir, and haven’t passed a Christmas without it since.
As part of my work with the Organ Clearing House I am often invited to visit churches that are offering their pipe organs for sale. You walk into the chancel and find drums, microphone stands, electronic keyboards, saxophone stands, and wires all over the floor. Are they played by professional musicians with liturgical backgrounds? Most often not. They’re more likely to be local amateurs playing from scores that come each week by subscription. My first recommendation always is that they should keep the organ. How do you know that the next pastor won’t want to use the organ? I think the organ is more permanent than those alternative forms of musical worship.
And why have those churches made those changes? We’re told that modern worshippers no longer connect to traditional musical forms. Why is that? Is it because public schools don’t expose students to the fine arts any more and it’s catching up with us? Is it because people listen to popular music genres so much that they cannot appreciate anything else?
Or is it because organists are failing to present interesting, thoughtful, varied, and challenging music programs that keep people interested and that give them something to think about as well as tunes to whistle? Is it because using the same ten carol arrangements every Christmas fails to interest our congregations? Is it because the same ten carol arrangements are offered in every church in town, in the county, in the state, or in the country?
Do we as musicians spend so much effort on the accuracy and correctness of our performance that we fail to present the emotions of the music to our congregations? Do we think so highly of our skills and knowledge of what’s correct that we program music that’s unintelligible to our congregations?
Think of a pipe organ as a high-performance machine. You step on the gas and your wig flies off. The builder of that machine intended that you’d feel the thrill of G-force cornering and lighter-than-air acceleration. Climb in a car like that and putt-putt to the grocery store to pick up milk and toilet paper and you’ve missed the point of the machine.
Your American organbuilders put thrilling instruments under your fingers, instruments that can go from zero-to-sixty in three measures, instruments that can both roar and caress. We rely on you the player to take it to the edge, to push it to the limit—to tell us about the limitations of our instruments. If the congregation—the consumer—is enthralled we get to keep at it.
If you’re not using that instrument so the congregation is thrilled, then we won’t get to build any more organs.
And organbuilders, it’s up to you too. Let’s not settle for ordinary. Ordinary is for substitutes. Let’s reserve extra-ordinary (say it slowly!) for the pipe organ, that high-performance machine with the capacity to thrill the players and the hearers. If we put magic under their fingers, they’ll put magic into the air. I’ll still be writing 30 years from now—and forget about the portion control! 

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Expressly expressive
I once heard an orchestral conductor state that the pipe organ is not an expressive instrument because the player cannot alter the volume of a single pipe. This ignorant statement was part of his argument against including an expensive new organ in an even more expensive new concert hall.
One might respond that most of the instruments of the symphony orchestra are unmusical because they can only play one note at a time. By saying “most” I’m excepting the strings of course, which can play two notes at time—maybe three under special circumstances. So an orchestra (by definition) needs many instruments to play music, expressively or not.
Aha! In order for the organ to be an expressive instrument, it comprises thousands of pipes. And big groups of those pipes are enclosed in wonderful expression machines that give the organist all sorts of control over dynamics.
The first Swell boxes were pretty simple affairs made of light wood with a few shutters in front that were operated by a lever near the floor. You could push the lever down and a little sideways with your foot to latch it open, you could let it slam closed, or you hold it halfway open, calf muscles a-trembling. Rigs like this are found on very old English organs, and there are quite a few nineteenth-century American organs that still have expression boxes like that. In 1996 I restored an organ built by E. & G.G. Hook in 1868 that had a “ratchet” Swell pedal. There was a sort of stationary wooden gear whose teeth could arrest the motion of the pedal in five or six different places. You could push the pedal a certain way to release the ratchet or you could leave the shutters partially open at any of those positions. And it was a good idea to release the ratchet as you opened the shutters—otherwise they said “click-click-click” as they opened.
The development of the mechanical balanced Swell pedal was a pretty big deal. Most American organs built between 1870 and 1900 have them. A sturdy mechanical linkage connects the pedal to the shutters. Because gravity works on horizontal shutters, balanced Swell shutters are almost always vertical. You can take your foot off the Swell pedal and the shutters stay still right where you left them. The only problem is that you have to remember to leave the shutters open when you’re finished playing to allow the temperature inside the Swell box to stay as close as possible to the ambient climate of the organ. Leaving the shutters closed typically results in a different temperature inside the Swell box so the Swell won’t be in tune with the Great. That’s not too big a deal because as soon as you open the shutters the temperature will moderate and the pitches will come back together—so if you’re halfway home and realize you’ve forgotten to leave the Swell pedal open, don’t worry about it too much!
If you get halfway home and wonder if you’ve left the blower running, then you’d better go back to the church.
And by the way, in most electro-pneumatic organs, the shutters are held open by springs, so when the organ is turned off the shutters open, no matter what position the pedal was left in.

§

During the Great Revival of classic styles of organbuilding in the second half of the twentieth century, many of us got used to playing organs that had no expression enclosures. Twenty years into that movement, shutters started finding their way back into organs, and today new organs are built with very sophisticated collections of expression chambers including double expressions—those fancy divisions in which an expression box that encloses ten stops might also enclose another expression box with five or six stops. It’s mighty effective when either very powerful voices (Tuba) or very soft voices (Unda Maris) are double-enclosed. The Tuba can start from nothing and Swell to a roar, and the Unda Maris can start from a whisper and vanish into thin air.
I often write about the organ as the most mechanical of instruments. (I’m glad that opinionated ignorant conductor didn’t wade into this pond!) A large organ, especially with electro-pneumatic action, can look like a mysterious mechanical monster inside. It’s no wonder that the sexton of your church mistakes it for a furnace room and piles it full of folding chairs. (You shouldn’t be storing chairs in the furnace room either.)
The organbuilder is forever challenged by the conflict between the organ’s mechanical identity and its artistic purpose. If the music is interrupted by too much mechanical noise, the effect is diminished.
The expression shutters can be the biggest culprit. Who among us has not sat through a recital or a worship service marred by a squeaking Swell shutter? I once attended a choral concert in a conservatory concert hall in which several pieces were accompanied on the organ. The Swell shutters were exposed as part of the façade, they squeaked, and the organist had an annoying habit of beating time with the Swell pedal. Flap-flap-flap, squeak-squeak-squeak was all we could hear.
I’ve made lots of service calls to correct squeaking shutters. Often enough a little squirt of oil or silicone is all that’s needed—that’ll be $200 for the travel and time and four cents for the squirt.

§

For the organist, the ideal expression shutters can silence the division when closed and allow it to roar when open. They can open or close in a nano-second, and if you operate the pedal slowly they provide infinite gradation of volume —no jerking from one stage to the next. OK, we’ll see what we can do.
In order to achieve really effective expression, the box and its shutters must be massive. If you build a Swell box and shutters out of three-quarter-inch-thick wood, you’re building more of a soundboard than an enclosure.
Let’s start with the fabric of the box. The walls and ceiling of the box should both deaden and reflect the sound of the organ. Deaden—so when the shutters are closed there’s no resonance going on. Reflect— so no sound is lost or absorbed by the interior surfaces. In other words, the sound should be effectively contained when the shutters are closed and when the shutters are open the sound should be propelled out through them.
Organbuilders have experimented with all sorts of construction styles. The simplest is heavy soft wood. Use two-inch-thick pine for the walls and you’re doing pretty well. Try two one-inch-panels with an airspace between. Just as massive, but the airspace cuts down the transmission of vibration. How about fill the airspace with sawdust? That works great—the sawdust really absorbs sound so the box is most effective when closed. But it’s a real drag when you’re surprised by fifteen cubic feet of sawdust pouring out by accident when you’re dismantling an organ.
There’s a material called MDF (maximum density fiberboard). It is manufactured in 4′ x 8′ sheets like plywood. It’s made from a sophisticated recipe, but it can be described simply as sawdust and glue cast into sheets. A sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood weighs about 65 pounds, heavy enough. But the same size sheet of MDF weighs 96 pounds. We have built a number of expression boxes using double-thicknesses of MDF. It’s hard work because the stuff is so heavy, and because it’s so dense it’s hard to cut—it burns up saw blades like kindling wood. But it sure makes an effective tonal enclosure.
My first work in organbuilding shops focused mostly on classic-style mechanical-action organs. It was from that bias I heard or read that E. M. Skinner had built cement swell boxes. Cement swell boxes? How decadent. What I pictured was the newly poured foundation of a house with rebar (steel reinforcement bars) sticking up out of it. How could that be musical? But when I finally worked on an organ that had such a thing I realized that my youthful and ignorant bias was exactly that—a youthful and ignorant bias. In fact, the “cement” swell box has a structure of studs and joists something like normal wood-frame construction with heavy plaster surfaces, and a finish coat of Keene’s Cement, which is an anhydrous calcined gypsum mixed with an accelerator used as a hard finish, or more to the point, hard plaster. The heavy structure of the walls and ceiling deaden the sound and the Keene’s Cement surface reflects it—the best of both worlds. The expression chambers of the mighty Skinner/Aeolian-Skinner organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York are built as free-standing rooms in the huge spaces some 90 feet up above both sides of the chancel. The walls are thick and heavy, and the surfaces are finished with Keene’s Cement, and those powerful reeds sure go quiet when the shutters are closed.

I shudder to think
What about the shutters? Just like the boxes, there are lots of ways to build expression shutters. They are usually made of wood, ideally an inch-and-a-half thick or more. The edges are usually beveled so they effectively overlap when closed. The edges of the shutters where they come in contact with one another usually have heavy felt or some other soft material glued to them so they close quietly and tightly. Some builders make shutters out of metal and we’ve even seen them made of glass and Plexiglas. Just like the walls of the expression chamber, the best shutters are massive and shaped and fit so they close really tight. The more massive, the more they contain the sound of the organ.
The shutters are mounted in frames—we call them expression frames. Sometimes the shutters are vertical, sometimes horizontal. As I said earlier, it’s easiest to build a balanced mechanical expression action if the shutters are vertical—that way there’s no effect of gravity on the weight of the shutters. All you have to balance is the action itself.
Shutters are mounted in the expression frames with some kind of rotary bearing to allow the shutters to pivot. Most often you find a strong steel pin (axle) that pivots in a hole drilled in hard wood. The holes and pins are greased, and if the shutters are vertical, the bottom bearing is figured out so as to keep the shutter high enough that it doesn’t rub against the wooden frame. In fact, those bottom bearings are often adjustable—if the shutter settles and starts squeaking against the frame, you can raise it with a turn of a screw.
Some organbuilders go the extra mile and use commercial ball bearings for mounting expression shutters.
It’s also ideal for the shutters to be easily removable. In many organs it’s necessary to remove shutters in order to tune, but you also want to be able to remove a shutter that has warped and needs to be planed straight.

And something to drive it
Some pneumatic expression systems feature an individual pneumatic to operate each shutter. Each contact on the expression pedal opens one shutter. (Most Möller organs work that way.) But it’s more common for the shutters to be linked together by an action that is in turn operated by a single machine. The machines can be electro-pneumatic or all-electric. But what you’re looking for is a combination of expression machine, linkage, and shutters that have a large enough travel so the shutters can close tight and open really wide, move silently when operated either fast or slow, and that have plenty of gradation between stages so that the range of expression seems infinite.
Most electro-pneumatic or electric expression machines have eight stages. It’s generally agreed that for most organs eight-stage expression are sufficient. I think it was Ernest Skinner who built the first sixteen-stage machines. (Dear reader, if you know otherwise please share it.) Those machines are elegant, fast, and powerful. Dividing the travel of the console expression machine into sixteen stages really gives a smooth operation.
Mr. Skinner called his expression motors Whiffle-trees. The term Whiffle-tree was originally used to describe the system of harnesses and reins that tied a team of horses together, allowing the weight of the load to be distributed between the horses according to their individual strength. Mr. Skinner used that principal to harness a row of pneumatic motors together so that each motor (or stage of the machine) contributes to the motion of the shutters and collectively they equal the total motion of the machine. Skinner’s Whiffle-tree expression motors were installed in thousands of Skinner and Aeolian-Skinner organs and in my opinion set the standard for electro-pneumatic pipe organ expression.
There are several suppliers to the pipe organ industry that have developed and market all-electric expression motors. The best of these use the powerful, compact, and quiet electric motors developed for wheelchairs. They are equipped with solid-state controls that translate the contacts on the console expression pedal into stages of expression. The organbuilder can adjust them for different distances of travel and adjust the amount of travel and the speed of each stage separately. So, for example, you can make the first step from fully closed be fast on opening (so it responds instantly) and slow on closing (so it doesn’t slam shut). Mr. Skinner handled this by using a small exhaust valve for the first stage, which choked its speed, keeping the shutters from slamming.

A rose by any other name
You’ll notice that I’m saying expression box, pedal, or shutter rather than Swell box. It’s true that most organs with expression are two-manual organs, and on a two-manual organ the expressive division is usually a Swell. But keeping the language clean, I’d rather not put a Choir division in a Swell box—so expression is the word.

§

In a large organ, the shutters of one division might collectively weigh close to a ton. It takes a lot of thought and skilled engineering to get that amount of stuff to move quickly and silently in response to the artistic twitch of an organist’s ankle. But when an expression chamber is working well, it can produce breathtaking effects. As familiar as I am with all that gear, I love to think of that big mass of stuff on the move when I’m sitting in the pews listening to an organ. It’s difficult to express.